Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

He was good at engineering ambiguities. I was bad at avoiding them.

It wasn’t like normal friendships where I worried if the other person still liked me. He liked hearing himself think aloud and I reasoned that I was profiting from it,

‘It could be worse,’ I said. ‘You could have no passions and also no stability.’

It could have meant anything, including what it purported to.

I’d explain him then. Men wore suits at the time, I’d say. They earned more than women. In Ireland you got five years for rape, fourteen for aborting your rapist’s foetus, and a lifetime in the laundries for the fact of being raped, and there was a laundry still open when you were born. None of this was directly the fault of the men you fucked but it influenced how you went about fucking them, especially in Dublin where you might need to ask them for money.

I looked out my window and told myself: it is fair enough to find it stressful that my entire life revolves around someone who does not care very much about me. This is a permissible experience.

He said men were scared of women now. ‘I’m not sure,’ Edith said, ‘if he’s scared he’ll grope us or scared we’ll tell HR.’

i’m guessing you don’t mind when things assume you’re male, which might explain your love of literature.

you still put more time and energy into showing you don’t love me than anyone has ever put into showing me they do.

We agreed also that the British obsession with dogs was creepy, both because of the volume of other animals they ate and in light of their historic and contemporary level of regard for humans.